It is the fourth time so far this year. Ecuadorian prisons have become the most insecure places on the planet, in physical spaces where, in a systematic and massive way, the practice of crushing human substance is reproduced. A saga of horror and death that suspends the right to life of every inmate who survives there. Prisons are total institutions – as Foucault would say – turned into slaughterhouses.
The relatives of the dismembered people are recipients of a suggestive story. Beyond the sensitivity contained in a collective condolence, the government tries to explain each massacre in the emergency of drug trafficking, the dispute over territory and the fights between gangs, without ruling out last-minute conspiracy theories that hint at political motives such as sabotage and terrorism; a strange discursive connection that appears in times when the Pandora Papers to the discomfort of the regimen. However, the deaths are explained on a dangerous moral basis. Although the judicial past of those murdered is distinguished, it is forgotten that they all deserve justice no matter what they did. The massacred people are then trapped in the dilemma of “good” and “evil”, in a war between prisoners-criminals that now does not differentiate between gangs, the status of the procedural cause or the trifle of the crime committed.
While the President Guillermo Lasso called to close ranks against a common enemy, drug trafficking, other stories were assembled. A few days after the new massacre of November 13, the National Assembly issued a report that highlights the needs of the prison system as a State problem, of course, under a subtle gaze that in retrospect reaches curiously to the government of Rafael Correa. Likewise, and after allowing each state of exception, the complacent Constitutional Court in March ordered the then government of Lenin Moreno to worry about the state of the prisons, although without declaring the state of affairs unconstitutional as its equivalent in Colombia did. After the new massacre, even the State Attorney General’s Office itself would have to pronounce against the abuse of preventive detention.
In addition to the accounts of non-compliance with international standards for persons deprived of liberty, the voices of experts, academics and current opinionologists are added. Most of his analyzes highlight the deficiencies of the State in the provision of human and economic resources, as well as the complaint about the deplorable conditions of incarceration. Under a Babylonian range of multi-causal proposals coexist initiatives to militarize and privatize prisons, hire more police officers, build “hard jail” regimes, request international cooperation, strengthen intelligence, make the carrying of weapons more flexible, immunize police action, reform laws, humanize prisons, pardon and reduce overcrowding, reduce red tape for pre-release, increase more prison judges, insist on the use of preventive detention as a ultimatum; anyway, a set of ideas where the “hard hand” and the “soft hand” are juxtaposed and collaborate.
All these stories build the reality of the relatives. But although each massacre produces a national commotion, there is no common cause. The explanations, reports or analyzes are lost from the path or reason that motivates them. The massacres are not discussed in themselves in terms of clarifying the truth, that is, the details that led those who were to be dismembered on November 13 to desperately call and chat with their relatives asking for their rescue. Despite the fact that their mothers and brothers -many of them stationed at the gate of the Penitentiary of the Litoral de Guayaquil- They begged for help for several hours, no police or military interrupted the causal course of the massacre. The detainees waited for the walls of their pavilion to fall; their messages transcribe not only heartbreaking farewells, but also a special form of impunity.
The relatives of the massacred people do not deserve to receive the story of “bad luck” or “fate”. Neither is the irresponsible US version that the prisons are controlled by local criminal gangs, since nothing that happened there has to do with the existence of any rational order, but rather with the violent rise of a brutal power. The Ecuadorian Prosecutor’s Office must investigate and accuse those who acted and participated in these massacres inside the prisons – paradoxically while one of their leaders is released for prison benefits. But You must also investigate those who did not provide assistance, having a legal obligation to do so., especially to decipher the existence or not of possible and complex networks of collusion.
Unlike the massacres of the Lurigancho and The Fronton (Peru, 1986) or the Carandirú (Brazil, 1992), those perpetrated on Ecuadorian soil do not exactly come from the direct hand of the police or the military. At first glance, the blood would only have to be splattered on the members of the organizations or gangs that, in a manifest way, appear as criminals. And, because in addition, a slight reading or close-up of the legal definition of Ecuador prevents subsuming the execrable international crime of extrajudicial execution, since those who acted to kill are strangers to the bureaucratic quality as public security agent, nor would they have actually received the command to execute them on your behalf.
What those who wish to invoke the strict Ecuadorian principle of legality forget is that the definition of extrajudicial execution is the product of international doctrine and jurisprudence. That is, for the Inter-American Court of Human Rights the encryption of its legal definition has not been closed, it is still a construct. Hence the differences between summary or mass executions, motivated or not for political reasons, with acquiescence, tolerance or deliberate omission as forms of fraud or intentionality. Its imprint is in the memory of the “easy trigger” and the techniques of “social cleansing”, but also in the series of massacres that took place in Latin American prisons, places where the State is in the position of guarantor of the life and integrity of the people who, in the name of its laws, were deprived of liberty. Therefore, any illicit death produced in prisons requires the application of the Minnesota Protocol.
In the once “island of peace” of Ecuador, nearly three hundred people have been massacred so far in 2021. The massacres show the harshness of organized crime in ways never seen in its republican life. Also the parsimony of a state that failed to protect its citizens by not immediately responding to the call of those who were murdered in their own prisons. No story is essential as long as there are no answers. Not only to satisfy the thirst for truth of the relatives of the victims, but so that Ecuadorian society knows that it is living together or not under the rule of law. If each massacre is not investigated in depth his victims would have died twice: first for their perpetrators and then for impunity.
* Professor at the Central University of Ecuador
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